Abstract
We discuss how habit is defined across disciplines that study human choices. In particular, we examine the role of learning in forming habits, the roles of automaticity, context and cues, limited attention/consideration, and whether habits reflect a change in preferences or a choice system which is partly decoupled from preferences. These constructs are used to create a framework for economics, psychology, and marketing research that is suitable for the analysis of consumer choice experiments and datasets. This paper arose from a session of the 2024 Choice Symposium at INSEAD. It reflects the contributions of a diverse set of scholars from a range of disciplines including psychology, neuroscience, economics, and marketing. Effort has been made to represent a wide range of perspectives and to highlight open questions and debate on the topic of habits. We would like to thank Haoran Li for research assistance.